Favorite things about Benin 3:

I was coasting down the other side of the hill I just climbed when I looked down at my front bicycle tire. That I could push it in to the point where I could touch the rim was not a good sign. 

I could no longer see Kristin, the volunteer with whom I was biking the 50k to Dassa, so I started walking. 

The first village I came across was 3k down the highway. I stopped two men who had just left the fields.

“Do you know a mechanic?” I asked.

“Yes. He is over there,” the man said, pointing in the general direction of the village, a classic example of Beninese directions.

Nothing in the direction he motioned looked like a place where I could get my tire fixed, so I kept walking, chalking up the interaction to a failure to understand my accent. 

Thirty feet later, another man comes running up from the village to me. He was the mechanic. So, I followed him back to his shop. And I made faces at the group of kids that steadily grew as word spread there was a Yovo in town while he patched my tire. And I thought about how much I love that I live in a place where I’m never more than walking distance from someone who can help me along my route.